No Excuses

Haven’t tried but it should. Maybe not the app but if you login through a browser, almost definitely. We use the CBC Gem website to stream CBC shows and it always works. Just mirror your phone to a smart TV, Apple TV etc.

Roche is a reliable company so this is good news. The vaccine news from Defense One is promising as well. There’s a decent chance to vaccinate against this eventually because the rate of mutation doesn’t seem high. A virus like HIV is almost impossible to vaccinate against because it mutates at an extraordinarily high rate as soon as it infects someone. That’s not the case here it seems according to preliminary data.

You download a VPN app from the App Store and connect to an Italian server. Now your browser thinks it’s accessing the Internet from Italy. I use this all the time to watch Canadian CBC tv shows.

The Ohio estimate going around almost definitely wrong. If there really were 100,000 cases just in Ohio, we would be seeing a much different outcome in the community.

FCPS closed today after getting bombarded with angry parent tweets and emails over the past 12 hours. They will probably announce a shutdown over the weekend. Just an insulting press conference by the superintendent yesterday.

Electing scientifically ignorant people has grave consequences.

As everyone suspected, Trump suppressed aggressive early-stage testing “because high case numbers would hurt my re-election”.

Having this talk with my wife’s parents tonight who care for her very old grandma. From the sounds of it, people aren’t taking it seriously in the Deep South. Her grandma is actually the one whose been sounding the alarm for a few weeks because she tunes into Chinese radio every day. Hopefully we can get through better.

Don’t think you can. If the public learns anything from this, it should be that don’t elect morons to office. And right now that is the entirety of the Republican Party. Politics is not a game and crises should not be managed by **** grabbing game show hosts.

Uh oh

——— Although who the **** knows. It is slowly becoming clear that we have botched the initial response horrifically. Republicans thought there would be no consequences to nominating and shamelessly empowering a deranged, pathological liar and narcissist.

Very unlikely they close grocery stores. Even Italy hasn’t gone that far yet. But they might institute more strict policies on how and when you can access. We’ve switched to mobile ordering from Whole Foods already but it’s unclear if they have the capacity to deliver as more and more people stop going in. Whole Foods relies on individual people delivering, they don’t have their own delivery service.

Also going to say, @tshile I feel your frustration on people who deny logic and facts in the face of overwhelming evidence. For people in any of the sciences, from medicine to climate science, the past 30 years has been a frustrating endeavor of dealing with a whirlwind of BS from unapologetically stupid people. But this country works and exists because a fraction of the population has taken the time to get educated and to care about others, and more often than not has always picked up the slack for everyone else. Your wife and family are on the front lines and we all owe you and others in similar situations a debt of gratitude.

Italy has suspended mortgage payments for all citizens for six months. We’re going to need similar measures here to keep the economy afloat by pumping money into the pockets of the lower and middle class that don’t have savings. It will be an interesting test of the Republican Party that has spent the past three years cutting corporate taxes and exploding the wealth of the 1% at the cost of public debt.

The cost of willful ignorance. You just have to hope that the younger Americans don’t grow up to be as unbelievably ignorant and proud of their stupidity as the older GOP voting bloc.

There’s some preliminary data that does indicate seasonality for this virus. Over the next few months, data will come out on how to best treat patients and there are clinical trials underway for anti-viral drugs. I thinks it’s entirely possible that we can bring down the mortality rate. I also think we need to work on making this part of the regular flu and strep panel that are administered anytime someone shows up with a fever and respiratory illness. A lot of the uncertainty right now is that this new territory for the healthcare system. Once testing is routine and we know the best course of treatment, it’s possible that this isn’t as scary as it is right now. Getting through the next few months while limiting case #s is crucial.

Yup. We don’t know how our peak will look, but it’s approaching. Flattening it asap is how we save the most lives.

We are self quarantining in my family for the next two weeks. More likely than not, we will see the peak of the epidemic in this timeframe. The more you can distance yourself, the better your chances are to not be caught in the initial wave of patients that will end up in healthcare facilities. This is the most dangerous time. Once the peak flattens, even if you get sick, you likely won’t be in situation where medical supplies are low and healthcare workers are overburdened. Our best hope is that the peak flattens within the next month. All form of social distancing to your best capacity in this timeframe is the best thing you can do right now.

Common cold is also a lot of viruses outside of the coronavirus family. I think only four coronavirus strains cause the cold. I suspect we don’t have a vaccine against them because it’s not necessary and under-studied, rather than not being feasible. A vaccine could work here but we don’t know how this thing mutates. It’s feasible that they can isolate a genomic region that has a low chance of acquiring mutations because it’s critical to the functioning of the virus.

How South Korea got this under control, a thread: Long story short, they leaned into technology, weren’t afraid of trying innovative approaches and mobilized extremely fast. Meanwhile, the FDA is asking people working on automated testing to MAIL RESULTS. I am honestly beginning to wonder when universities and hospitals will just give the federal government the middle finger and go rogue.

To say that ”nothing could have been done” is just so so ignorant. You can look at how this unfolded in a country that mobilized quickly and a country that didn’t. And Italy has an authoritarian government whereas South Korea is a liberal democracy. They didn’t enact draconian measures like China. A lot of people are going to die and suffer in this country unnecessarily because of leadership failure to warn, to act quick and to distribute resources.

By the point where we are currently, South Korea had already tested 100,000 people. We are at 4500. That is a failure of the government: the CDC for not mobilizing testing throughout the country and the FDA for not yet allowing automated testing. And the biggest failure is the orange buffoon telling people that is just like the flu and go to work even if you’re sick. Even if 70% of sensible people ignore his advice, 30% of the population takes him at his word and that is enough to make a bad situation even worse. We can’t even mobilize basic testing kits. I’m worried what happens when hospitals need emergency supplies.

I know for sure that AU is extending spring break and moving classes online for a month, possibly longer depending on the situation in April. Haven't seen GTown or GW yet, but they should also follow suit at this point.

I wonder how much people will realize once things return to normal that a lot of core activities can be done online, far far cheaper without any loss of quality and probably more efficiency. Hoping that some social changes that are right now for distancing purposes can be repurposed just as better business practices.